"Understandings of Media" (original) (raw)

Related papers

Introduction: What is a medium? Theologies, technologies and aspirations

Social Anthropology, 2011

Anybody posing the question ‘What is a medium?’ has to confront the great multiplicity and broad range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To give an impression, in a recent survey of the field, the following objects and phenomena were listed as having been labelled a medium: a chair, a wheel, a mirror (McLuhan); a school class, a soccer ball, a waiting room (Flusser); the electoral system, a general strike, the street (Baudrillard); a horse, the dromedary, the elephant (Virilio); money, power and influence (Parsons); art, belief and love (Luhmann) (Münker and Roesler 2008: 11). What, then, if anything, cannot be a medium? And, more to the point of this issue, could the answers we might give point to something like an anthropological approach to media?

Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy

2015

Transmission and/or Understanding? On the 'Postal' and 'Erotic' Principles of Communication Two Preliminaries and a Problem How can the meaning of media be thought about in such a way that we acquire an understanding of our relationship to both the world and to ourselves? How can a concept of the medium be developed that encompasses our experiences using media? How can we determine what media 'are' in a way that embraces both generally accepted (voice, writing) and newer forms of media (computer, Internet)? How can media be conceptualized in a way that enables not only a reformulation of traditional philosophical questions but also a new conception of philosophy? Assuming first of all that one media concept could actually address all of these various questions, wouldn't this concept remain so abstract and general (in a bad sense), wouldn't it turn out so bare and tenuous, that it would say nothing and therefore not provide any answer at all? As in most cases, it depends on the attempt. 1 And in order to let the cat out of the bag immediately let me state that this attempt will address the question 'What is a medium?' in the context of the idea of the errand. The messenger thus represents a primal scene of media transmission. You could even say that the messenger represents the force behind these reflections on media, and my claim is that this relationship -measured against the present state of the debate over media -provides a new perspective on the phenomenon and concept of media. Isn't this a strange or downright outlandish effort? The messenger appears to be a relic of an epoch when the technical support of long-distance communication was not available, and it became obsolete with the development of the postal service or at the very least with the invention of the radio, the telegraph, and the telephone -not to mention the computer. What could the archaic institution of the messenger offer to modern media theory, whose reflections and explanations must address more advanced media? This provocative impression, which is often evoked by references to the messenger, is further reinforced by two associated preliminaries and an intruding problem: (i) First Preliminary: 'There is always an outside of media.' Messengers are heteronomous. The messenger perspective thus challenges attempts to conventionalize media as autonomous sovereign agents or the solitary The following section continues with a look at contemporary reflections on media, albeit limited to the discourses of cultural studies and philosophy. 1 The debate over media that was first articulated in the 1960s and continues to flourish today is confusing, multivocal and heterogeneous: there is no consensus in the phenomenal domain, the methodological approach or even the very concept of media. Nevertheless, through the multitude of heterogeneous voices -at least in the cultural studies camp -it is possible to perceive a certain vocal range that could be called the 'bon ton of the media debate'. This 'bon ton' involves reflecting and researching media with an attitude that is committed to a maxim of generativity. Lorenz Engell expressed this maxim with enviable clarity: 'Media are fundamentally generative.' 2 The meaning is obvious: in contrast to a marginalizing perspective, which treats media as negligible vehicles that add nothing to the messages they convey, this maxim signals a change in perspective that turns towards the media themselves rather than their contents. By shaping their contents, media fundamentally participate in the generation of messages -when not entirely producing them. Marshall McLuhan's provocative thesis 'the medium is the message' radically challenges the assumption that media are transparent and thus a secondary phenomenon that offers the most unimpeded view of the 'actual' objects of humanistic work, like 'sense', 'meaning', 'spirit', 'form', and 'content' -an assumption that had previously been taken for granted by the humanities. 3 The 'culturalization of the humanities', which was so characteristic of the outgoing twentieth century, thus found a support and a material grounding in the medialization of sense, spirit, and content. In the heterogeneous field of media theory a small common denominator is the idea that media not only relay their contents, but are also fundamentally generative. Doesn't this assumption of the shaping power of media towards their messages represent a necessary presupposition for all media theoretical efforts, insofar as these efforts would make themselves meaningless without this assumption? Where then lies the problem with the 'generative maxim'? 4 In order to trace this problem, I will now turn to philosophy.

The modalities of media: A model for understanding intermedial relations

Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, 2010

The most important aim of this essay is to present a theoretical framework that explains and describes how media are related to each other: what they have in common, in what ways they differ and how these differences are bridged over by intermediality. In order to accomplish this, it must be understood that the concept of medium generally includes several types or levels of mediality that have to be correlated with each other.

The Medium as Platform: An Emerging Sense of Medium

NMEDIAC: Journal of New Media & Culture, 2002

This paper argues for an approach to the study of new media that distinguishes between different "senses" of medium standing in a continuum. It identifies an emerging sense of medium, which has to do with an understanding of the medium as a platform.

"The Questionable Reality of Media”

In John Brockman, (Ed.), Ways of Knowing: The Reality Club 3, Prentice Hall, 1991, 141-160., 1991

What are “media”? The question seems too simple to deserve a serious answer. Although media are commonly thought to alter the reality of various social phenomena—politics, socialization, education, gender roles, the level of social violence, and so on—the reality of media is generally seen as unproblematic. It is agreed that media do certain things, but for many observers, media themselves simply are. Their nature is apparently too transparent to require massive discussion and analysis. Yet, as with all observations of the world, our conceptions of media are themselves mediated by mental constructs. As with other attempts to comprehend complex phenomena, we rely, often sub consciously, on metaphorical thinking to simplify and clarify what media are. Metaphors are potent and valuable thinking tools. They help us to see clearly. But they also blind us to alternative views. Once we fasten on one metaphor for a phenomenon, it becomes difficult to think of the phenomenon as anything other than that metaphor. This is true for metaphors for media as well. Although a vast array of implicit and explicit metaphors exists in analyses of media, my contention is that virtually all the questions and statements about any medium, or about media in general, can be related to one of three central metaphors for what a medium of communication is: medium as a vessel or conduit (leading to the study of the content of media), medium as a language (leading to the study of the use and impact of production variables, or media grammar), and medium as a setting or environment (leading to the study of the relatively fixed characteristics of each medium or type of media, apart from content and grammar variables). An examination of these three core metaphors involves pushing aside for the moment the diverse surface concerns that critics, researchers, and average citizens have about media and asking instead, What are the major underlying conceptions of the reality of media and what are their distinct implications of each conception? (c) 1991 by Joshua Meyrowitz

Medium, Messenger, Transmission

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2016

Transmission and/or Understanding? On the 'Postal' and 'Erotic' Principles of Communication Two Preliminaries and a Problem How can the meaning of media be thought about in such a way that we acquire an understanding of our relationship to both the world and to ourselves? How can a concept of the medium be developed that encompasses our experiences using media? How can we determine what media 'are' in a way that embraces both generally accepted (voice, writing) and newer forms of media (computer, Internet)? How can media be conceptualized in a way that enables not only a reformulation of traditional philosophical questions but also a new conception of philosophy? Assuming first of all that one media concept could actually address all of these various questions, wouldn't this concept remain so abstract and general (in a bad sense), wouldn't it turn out so bare and tenuous, that it would say nothing and therefore not provide any answer at all? As in most cases, it depends on the attempt. 1 And in order to let the cat out of the bag immediately let me state that this attempt will address the question 'What is a medium?' in the context of the idea of the errand. The messenger thus represents a primal scene of media transmission. You could even say that the messenger represents the force behind these reflections on media, and my claim is that this relationship -measured against the present state of the debate over media -provides a new perspective on the phenomenon and concept of media. Isn't this a strange or downright outlandish effort? The messenger appears to be a relic of an epoch when the technical support of long-distance communication was not available, and it became obsolete with the development of the postal service or at the very least with the invention of the radio, the telegraph, and the telephone -not to mention the computer. What could the archaic institution of the messenger offer to modern media theory, whose reflections and explanations must address more advanced media? This provocative impression, which is often evoked by references to the messenger, is further reinforced by two associated preliminaries and an intruding problem: (i) First Preliminary: 'There is always an outside of media.' Messengers are heteronomous. The messenger perspective thus challenges attempts to conventionalize media as autonomous sovereign agents or the solitary The following section continues with a look at contemporary reflections on media, albeit limited to the discourses of cultural studies and philosophy. 1 The debate over media that was first articulated in the 1960s and continues to flourish today is confusing, multivocal and heterogeneous: there is no consensus in the phenomenal domain, the methodological approach or even the very concept of media. Nevertheless, through the multitude of heterogeneous voices -at least in the cultural studies camp -it is possible to perceive a certain vocal range that could be called the 'bon ton of the media debate'. This 'bon ton' involves reflecting and researching media with an attitude that is committed to a maxim of generativity. Lorenz Engell expressed this maxim with enviable clarity: 'Media are fundamentally generative.' 2 The meaning is obvious: in contrast to a marginalizing perspective, which treats media as negligible vehicles that add nothing to the messages they convey, this maxim signals a change in perspective that turns towards the media themselves rather than their contents. By shaping their contents, media fundamentally participate in the generation of messages -when not entirely producing them. Marshall McLuhan's provocative thesis 'the medium is the message' radically challenges the assumption that media are transparent and thus a secondary phenomenon that offers the most unimpeded view of the 'actual' objects of humanistic work, like 'sense', 'meaning', 'spirit', 'form', and 'content' -an assumption that had previously been taken for granted by the humanities. 3 The 'culturalization of the humanities', which was so characteristic of the outgoing twentieth century, thus found a support and a material grounding in the medialization of sense, spirit, and content. In the heterogeneous field of media theory a small common denominator is the idea that media not only relay their contents, but are also fundamentally generative. Doesn't this assumption of the shaping power of media towards their messages represent a necessary presupposition for all media theoretical efforts, insofar as these efforts would make themselves meaningless without this assumption? Where then lies the problem with the 'generative maxim'? 4 In order to trace this problem, I will now turn to philosophy.

Analyzing Media: Metaphors as Methodologies

Students have little intuitive insight into the process of thinking and structuring ideas. The image of metaphor for a phenomenon acts as a kind of methodology for the study of the phenomenon by (1) defining the key issues or problems; (2) shaping the type of research questions that are asked; (3) defining the type of data that are searched out; (4) shaping the language in which the problem and results are expressed; (5) determining the procedures that are used to examine and collect data; and (6) determining what problems, questions, data, and procedures are ignored. For example, the most common metaphor for a medium is that it is a kind of "conveyor belt." The medium is seen as a passive delivery system of important messages. A very different metaphor for a medium is that it is a "language," that is, a specific way of encoding a message. This leads to the analysis of production variables or a study of the expressive potential of the particular medium. In television and film such variables as shot selection, choice of lens, camera angles, and so on can be studied to see how they affect perception and interpretation of the content. A third possible metaphor in media research is "environment." The medium is seen as a type of social context or social situation that includes and excludes participants. The use of metaphors is one way to start students thinking about thinking before they fully realize it. (HOD) “Analyzing Media: Metaphors as Methodologies,” Resources in Education (ERIC), Vol. 17(1), January 1982 (ED 206 030).